Sunday, August 24, 2014

The Dangers of Ersatz Religion

The German word 'Ersatz' means 'substitute' in English, a term picked up by psychologists to describe what happens when people compensate for an unfulfilled psychological need by substituting something else, usually an inferior copy of the real thing needed.  Wikipedia has an article called "Ersatz good" which describes early German usage of the term (in German it can mean both a perfectly good substitute as well as an inadequate substitute).  Auf deutsch it has more of a literal meaning that the psychologized meaning it took on in English during the 1960s.  Today it seems more closely allied with the German usage than it was back then.  We hear of ersatz coffee, for example, to simply denote an inferior version of java.

The philosopher David Lewis considered "ersatzism" of the philosophical / psychological kind extensively in his analysis of possible worlds ontologies.  He talks about linguistic, pictorial and magical ersatzism.  Without getting into the distinctions between these three types, let us say that science to some extent engages necessarily in the first two, linguistic and pictorial ersatzism simply by the sheer fact that it is the job of science to create mathematical models of what we think is going on in nature, and mathematical models are nearly always simplifications or idealizations of the real thing they are trying to model.  However, with the advent of complex computer models and simulations of natural, dynamic phenomena, there has been a noticeable drift on the part of many scientists into the third category of magical ersatzism.

Science has for long relied on the corrective feedback mechanism of experiment to validate or refute its myriad hypotheses.  But since the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s and especially in the 1990s and beyond, computer simulations have slowly and subtly taken the place of hard empirical evidence in many areas of scientific research.  Owing to the ever evolving complexity and resource demands of such simulations, many of them are not easy for the ordinary scientist to reproduce -- let alone the educated layman.  They may require supercomputers to run and --heaven forbid! -- the use of arcane computer languages like FORTRAN.  Because of this, many of these models and simulations have taken on the air of divine oracles that only the anointed high priests may approach and which have become substitutes for nature herself in being the judge of the soundness of theories.

The global warming hysteria of the 1990s and early 2000s is a prime example of this.  Here the IPPC-endorsed models, those of NASA and other normally reputable organizations, have taken on the roles of infallible courts of last appeal.  Hypotheses and theories of climate dynamics were endorsed or rejected solely on the basis of whether or not they agreed with or disagreed with these models.  The result was self-reinforced confirmation bias on the part of those who stood guard over and maintained these models.

But, alas, Mother Nature, is not to be fooled forever.  Even the climate change alarmists cannot deny that their predictions of C02-caused temperature rise have not been borne out by the empirical evidence of the last 15 years.  There new buzz word to deal with all of this is 'hiatus.'  Here's how the editor of Science magazine summarizes the findings:
Global warming seems to have paused over the past 15 years while the deep ocean takes the heat instead. The thermal capacity of the oceans far exceeds that of the atmosphere, so the oceans can store up to 90% of the heat buildup caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Chen and Tung used observational data to trace the pathways of recent ocean heating. They conclude that the deep Atlantic and Southern Oceans, but not the Pacific, have absorbed the excess heat that would otherwise have fueled continued warming.  
My translation is that they are finally saying that climate scientists predictions of temperature rise over the last 15 years have been on the whole consistently wrong, i.e., lacking in evidence.  In fact, some of the mechanisms being offered now as explanations are very similar to those offered by scientist Roy Spencer with regards to Pacific Decadal Oscillations.  Spencer, it should be noted, is consistently lambasted as a 'climate denier.'

My concern is that there are not only faulty scientific methodologies at work in the alarmist camp of climate science but also ersatz religion.  When you combine atheism (i.e., the denial of one's true religious needs) with scientism (the overemphasis of human rationality to solve all problems), you get an bad mix of things:  People looking for meaning in their lives and trying to find it in places it doesn't exist.  Thus, well-intended ersatz goals for humanity -- "we need to save the planet from evil planet-destroying capitalism!" -- are combined with wishful thinking pseudo-science (i.e., linguistic, pictorial ersatzism) until you arrive at magical ersatzism.

The danger is that these sort of pseudo scientific ersatz religions can easily drift over into totalitarian practices, like lefties trying to shut down scientific debate on the matter.  (Remember Al Gore's "settled science?")  Atheism as we know it today does not really have a very long history.  It emerged as a significant militant force in the world only since the dawn of the Enlightenment in the 18th century (which in turn has its roots in the Protestant Rebellion of the 16th century).  The French Revolution saw atheism combine with political passion; they invented the guillotine to more efficiently deal with deniers.  It bore the fruit of millions of murdered victims during the reign of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism and Communism during the 20th century.  There were plenty of Nazi scientists whose research and "data" sought to confirm the notion of German racial superiority and the inferiority of everybody else, most notably the Jews.

In complicated dynamical systems, whether natural or man-made -- and especially in global natural, earthly phenomena -- oscillations are the norm.  Control engineers know this all too well.  Many periodic phenomena are superimposed to yield many cycles of behavior from diurnal cycles to seasonal cycles to decadal, 20-year, 40-year, 100-year cycles and beyond.  Periodic phenomena are a ubiquitous feature of nature:  Rotation and orbits around hot masses called stars in the universal law of things.  We have only a very  meager understanding of these cycles on planet earth and have data samples for only a small fraction of the earth's 5 billion year history.  It is preposterous to substitute hypothetical, computer models based on a small sampling of data that only begins to to tell the story of very short-term phenomena.

But the real danger stems from those who would combine ersatz religions (pick your favorite 'ism') with pseudo science.  People need to have meaning in their lives and will search for it until they latch onto something that resembles it.  Surely, the prospect of saving the planet offers such meaning.  "Hope and change" are slogans of such people who are looking for real meaning in their lives but who have settled for something far less.  Hope is a good thing as long as what you are hoping for is a good thing.  But blind hope is as dangerous as blind faith.  Change is good, too, as long as the change is from bad to good, from worse to better.  But change from moderately good to something really bad is not to be desired.  

It is best to honestly and humbly strive to to discover the difference between real and apparent goods and then to set up goals based on a sound understanding of this.  Otherwise, we'll be jousting windmills with Mr. Quixote or worse, eliminating millions of innocent people like Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin.

To be fair and complete, the climate scientists proclamation that the hiatus is real, although a step in the right direction, does not yet allow one to definitely claim that global warming is now turning into global cooling. They claim that the heat is being stored deep in the Atlantic ocean and will reappear, or at least will cease absorbing the heat from the atmosphere in 15 years, giving rise to accelerated heating then. The hiatus is only a leveling off, not a reversal. We may have to wait a few more years before they admit to seeing a reversal trend. Then the word 'hiatus' will have to be discarded for something new, like 'temporary dip' in temperature. But this is what natural oscillations are all about, rises and dips in periodic phenomena.  They are still sticking to their story of the long-term upward trend.  But that upward trend may in fact just be the rise of longer period oscillation.  Only time will tell.

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